Category Archives: Lands

Key Syria rebel group quits opposition talks?

AFP reports: One of Syria’s main rebel groups, Ahrar al-Sham, on Thursday pulled out of opposition talks aimed at forging a united front ahead of potential discussions with President Bashar Assad’s government.

It said it took the decision because of “the fundamental role… given to personalities linked to the regime” at the conference in Riyadh.

It named the Syria-based National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change, which is generally tolerated by the government and participated in talks organized by Moscow on the conflict in 2014 and 2015.

Allied with the Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham said it “rejects the outcomes” of the meeting which “did not affirm the identity of our Muslim people” in Syria.

The Riyadh conference which opened Wednesday and its outcomes were not “truly” representative of the Syrian “revolutionary factions”, the group said.

Ahrar al-Sham had agreed to attend the Riyadh talks despite the “lack of representation of jihadi factions at a level matching their… role” on the ground in Syria.

But the Islamist group had warned it “will not accept the results of this conference” unless they include “cleansing Syrian territories of the Russian-Iranian occupation and sectarian militia supporting them.” [Continue reading…]

Earlier, Aron Lund wrote: If the conference fails, through high-profile defections or a failure to reach agreement, the opposition will have stumbled on the threshold of the new peace process. Assad, Iran, and Russia will be overjoyed and current trends in the West, where countries are fast losing the last of their faith in Syria’s opposition, will be reinforced. But if the conference succeeds in producing a joint platform and keeps all the major groups on board, particularly the armed ones, it will have been a step toward a real political process—a necessary step, but not in itself sufficient.

Many problems remain, including the difficulty of accommodating hardline Islamist demands in a process geared to produce a political compromise, while also not alienating the rebel fighters that need to be involved for the process to have any meaning. Ahrar al-Sham opened the talks demanding “the complete cleansing of the Russian-Iranian occupation of Syrian land, and the sectarian militias which support it,” also calling for the “overthrow of the Assad regime with all its pillars and symbols, and handing them over for fair trial.” The United States, for its part, is imploring the opposition to come up with “creative language” on the issue of whether Bashar al-Assad should stay or go, seeing a measure of intentional ambiguity as the only realistic way to move forward. [Continue reading…]

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From a severed pig’s head to a bullet-riddled Koran, attacks on Muslims are rising

The Los Angeles Times reports: Attacks on mosques appear to have become more frequent and threats against Muslims more menacing since the terrorist attacks in Paris and the shooting in San Bernardino.

“A pigs head at a mosque in Philadelphia, a girl harassed at a school in New York, hate mail sent to a New Jersey mosque … I can’t event count the amount of hate mail and threats we have received,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Hooper said he witnessed a similar upswing in Islamophobia after the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris in January, but nothing close to the litany of attacks, vandalism and racially-charged threats in recent weeks: [Continue reading…]

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Why India’s plan to fight climate change doesn’t hold water

By Steffen Böhm, University of Essex; Sanjay Lanka, University of Essex, and Zareen Pervez Bharucha, University of Essex

As the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases globally, the pressure is on India to offer something meaningful at the Paris climate talks. Yet the country demands the right to develop and lift its population out of poverty.

In its official submission to the summit, the so-called INDC (Intended Nationally Determined Contributions) which every country had to provide before negotiations began, India pledges to reduce the emissions intensity of GDP by 33 to 35% by 2030 based on 2005 levels. It proposes to achieve this by investing significantly in low-carbon technologies. But do these numbers stack up?

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi addresses the Paris talks.
Guillaume Horcajuelo/EPA

It may have the third highest greenhouse gas emissions on the planet, but India’s emissions per person are much lower than those of all so-called developed countries. This is why stakeholders insist on India’s right to develop.

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Peru’s untold stories of forced sterilisation are being heard at last

By Matthew Brown, University of Bristol and Karen Tucker, University of Bristol

During the 1990s, thousands of Peru’s citzens were sterilised without their consent as part of a National Population Programme. Brought in by President Alberto Fujimori, this programme was supposed to offer all Peruvians access to a range of contraception options. But it also extended to mass forcible sterilisations. At least 17 people subjected to sterilisation died as a result of botched operations carried out with indifference or without adequate care.

For the last 15 years these abuses have been known only to a small group of people, even as Peru has taken pains to face up to the violence of its recent history.

The Peruvian state spent the 1990s waging a merciless war against guerrilla groups that sought to destroy it – among them the radical Marxist group Shining Path – and hundreds of thousands of civilians were caught in the crossfire or deliberately targeted.

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To defeat ISIS, embrace refugees

Musa al-Gharbi writes: In the aftermath of the series of attacks in Paris, attributed to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), French President François Hollande has declared a three-month state of emergency. This measure enables the military and law enforcement to monitor, arrest, detain and interrogate persons, with little or no due process. These powers will be exercised primarily against France’s besieged Arab, Muslim, immigrant and refugee populations.

Meanwhile, France has closed its borders and is calling for an indefinite suspension of the EU’s open-border (“Schengen”) system. Other EU states are calling for reducing the Schengen zone to exclude those countries most effected by the refugee crisis. Throughout the EU there is growing resistance to admitting or resettling refugees from the greater Middle East.

Across the Atlantic, the U.S. House of Representatives has overwhelmingly voted to halt the already stringent and meager U.S. program to resettle refugees from Iraq and Syria. Thirty-one governors have warned that would-be migrants from the Middle East are not welcome in their states, and a majority of the American public has turned against accepting more refugees. One of the frontrunner candidates for president of the United States, Donald Trump, has even called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” All of these maneuvers are playing into the hands of ISIS.

ISIS has strongly condemned refugees’ seeking asylum in Western nations, repeatedly warned would-be expatriates that Muslims will never be truly accepted in the United States and the EU (hence the importance of an “Islamic State”). In order to render this a self-fulfilling prophecy, ISIS ensured that one of the attackers carried a fraudulent Syrian passport, which was left to be discovered at the scene of the crime before its owner detonated his suicide vest.

ISIS is counting on Western nations to turn would-be refugees back towards their “caliphate,” because this massive outpouring of asylum seekers poses a severe threat to the legitimacy and long-term viability of ISIS. Accordingly, if Western nations were truly committed to undermining ISIS, they should embrace and integrate refugees from ISIS-occupied lands. [Continue reading…]

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What the world is witnessing is the liquidation of Syria

Leila Hudson writes: By the end of September 2015, 8,000 refugees and migrants, most of them Syrian, were arriving in Europe every day. By November, even with the onset of winter, that number had risen to an average of 8,700, with as many as 10,000 arriving on Greek shores on one October day. As of November 2015, the UNHCR counted 744,000 arrivals for the year, nearly triple the 219,000 who came in 2014. The millions displaced by Syria’s civil war and hundreds of thousands making their way by foot, boat, train, bus, car and truck across Eastern Europe are people hoping to live and work in peace and dignity somewhere on the planet. They are not a swarm or an invasion or a metastasis. As the aftermath of the November 13 Paris massacres showed, refugees do not seem to be a vector for terrorism, which is more easily incubated domestically and through communications networks. They are girls, boys, men and women, and every one of them has a full complement of ordinary hopes, fears and dreams. Most have experienced trauma and mustered tremendous willpower and determination. How the world treats them will have consequences for all.

What might one day be remembered as the Great Syrian Migration for its scale, or the Syrian Exodus for its epic and tragic character, is currently referred to as the European migration crisis. The proto-genocidal war in Syria, and even the pressures of four million refugees on Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey are by any measure more critical than the challenges to Europe’s immigration and integration policies. However, these problems were easier for the global north to dismiss as part of a chronically benighted and distant Middle East. There has been some media controversy over this Eurocentric framing of the issue and how to refer to these asylum seekers. Al-Jazeera announced a policy decision to avoid the word “migrant” and exclusively use the word “refugee,” as flight from war zones creates de facto refugees. Under the spirit of the 1951 Geneva Convention, the fact of displacement generates refugee status until proven otherwise. Most North American and European mainstream media outlets continue to use the term “migrant,” assuming that it is neutral and descriptive, and that legal refugee status will be confirmed, de jure, by an asylum court or other formal national or international process. There are important legal implications depending on the word and assumptions used; those judged to be refugees have a path to asylum and legal status, while economic migrants are subject to deportation. The displaced people themselves often prefer not to be labeled and categorized.

As this subject is discussed in the English-language media, the core of Syrian refugees is joined each week by people fleeing Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Pakistan, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Bangladesh and recently even Iran and Lebanon. Refugees and migrants from other zones of war and poverty are joining the caravan to Europe, sometimes even claiming to be Syrian to gain an edge in the quest for asylum. Falsified Syrian papers are available for purchase from the same smugglers selling rubber dinghies on the Turkish coast. These non-Syrian refugees and migrants are pushed from their homes by inequality, fear and insecurity and lured by promises of freedom, tolerance and prosperity. [Continue reading…]

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Syrians accuse Russia of targeting civilian areas

The Guardian reports: Syrians say Russians are not only reckless about choosing targets, but also appear to be intentionally bombing some civilian areas.

Survivors, doctors treating the injured, and local commanders believe the Sukhoi jets, flying from a new airbase in the coastal Latakia province, are hitting homes in a deliberate campaign to break fighters’ morale and depopulate swaths of the countryside.

“They are targeting the civilians at night, and mostly frontlines during the day,” says Abu Hussain, a Turkmen rebel commander, a high-rank defector from the Syrian army. “It’s because they don’t want anyone to film the jets bombing at night, so you can’t prove their identity.”

That matches images and accounts of the airstrike on Raghat’s house [the home of a five-year-old girl described earlier in this report], which her uncle Ali says began moments after 9pm on 1 October. In one of her last photographs, she holds a lit torch, and video her uncle says was shot soon after the bombing shows flames raging through the house against a dark sky.

Russian airstrikes killed at least 295 Syrian civilians in October alone, according to monitoring group Airwars, which keeps an extensive database of images, videos, reports and biographies of the dead.

“Based on all field reporting, the number of alleged civilian casualties attributed to Russia is many times what we see being claimed against the US-led coalition,” says Chris Woods, who runs the Airwars project.

“We think the primary reason here that the casualties are so high is the type of munitions that Russia is using, mostly ‘dumb bombs’ which almost always mean more civilian deaths. That is closely followed by where and how Russia is bombing. There is no doubt that Russia is bombing civilian neighbourhoods.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump is no more racist than mainstream Israeli policy

Mairav Zonszein writes: Racism — and various forms of discrimination against Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians — is just as rampant here in Israel as it is inside the Trump camp, if not more so. Except in Israel, racism and ethno-religious discrimination is not only accepted rhetoric in the halls of power and the sidewalk cafes of Tel Aviv, it is also long-standing formal state policy.

Trump called to ban Muslims from entering the United States. In Israel, there is already a law banning Muslims from immigrating — the “Law of Return” which gives that right to Jews alone. Even those who were born here but fled, or whose families lived here for generations upon generations, are forbidden from returning.

The Anti-Defamation League on Monday called Trump’s plan to “bar people from entry to the United States based on their religion” is “deeply offensive and runs contrary to our nation’s deepest values.” Has the ADL ever spoken out against Israel’s Jewish-only immigration law and discriminatory border control policies?

Inherent institutional racism can also be seen in the two separate-and-unequal legal systems for Palestinians and Israelis living meters from one another in the occupied West Bank. It can be seen the total negligence of infrastructure, resources and education for Palestinians in annexed East Jerusalem as opposed to Jewish neighborhoods in the same territory. It can be seen in the rampant and deep-seeded discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel when it comes to housing, land confiscation and re-distribution, education and employment. And these are just the most obvious examples. [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu to meet Trump despite outcry over call for Muslim ban

The Guardian reports: The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has confirmed he will meet Donald Trump despite an international outcry over the Republican presidential frontrunner’s suggestion that Muslims should be banned from entering the US.

The meeting – scheduled before Trump’s remarks triggered outrage in the US and globally – is due to take place on 28 December and is certain to be controversial in a country where a large minority of Israeli citizens are Muslims of Palestinian origin. Dozens of Israeli MPs have called for the invitation to be rescinded.

Visits by US presidential candidates to Israel are often seen as much a part of their campaigning as stumping in Iowa or New Hampshire. The decision to go ahead with the meeting comes 24 hours after Trump’s comments and after the Israeli prime minister’s office declined to comment on the Republican’s remarks in light of his planned visit. Trump will not, however, be visiting neighbouring Jordan as had earlier been suggested.

The meeting was arranged a couple of weeks ago, Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday, adding that the prime minister would meet any candidate from any party who arrives in Israel and seeks a meeting.

Trump announced on 3 December his plan to visit Israel. “Very soon I’m going to Israel,” Trump said at a rally in Virginia. “I’m going to be meeting with Bibi Netanyahu who’s a great guy – I love Israel and will support it wholeheartedly.”

The visit seems certain to be a minefield of protocol and diplomatic stage management, not least because of inflammatory remarks made by Netanyahu during Israel’s elections this year when he warned voters of “Arab voters coming out in droves”. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS has become the overwhelming obsession of Western governments, clouding all other issues

An extract from Jonathan Littell’s new book, Syrian Notebooks, begins:

The world is not yours alone
There is a place for all of us
You don’t have the right to own it all.

– An anonymous Syrian yelling in the night at a regime sniper

It starts, as always, with a dream, a dream of youth, liberty, and collective joy; and it ends, as all too often, in a nightmare. The nightmare still goes on and will last much longer than the dream: struggle as they can, no one knows how to wake up from it. And it keeps spilling over, infecting ever wider zones, all the while seeping through our screens to come lap up against our gray mornings, tingeing them with a distant bitterness we do our best to ignore. A vague and remote nightmare, highly cinematographic, a kaleidoscope of mass executions, orange jumpsuits, and severed heads, triumphant columns of looted American armor, beards and black masks, and a black banner all too reminiscent of the pirate flags of our childhoods. Spectacular images that have served to mask, even erase, those forming the undertow of the same nightmare: thousands of naked bodies tortured and meticulously recorded by an obscenely precise administration, barrels of explosives tossed at random on neighborhoods full of women and children, toxic gasses sending hundreds into foaming convulsions, flags, parades, posters, a tall smiling ophthalmologist and his triumphant “re-election.” The medieval barbarians on one side, the pitiless dictator on the other, the only two images we retain of a reality far more complex, opposing them when in fact they are but two sides of the same coin, one coin among many in a variety of currencies for which no exchange rate was ever set. [Continue reading…]

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Residents of Ramadi say ISIS ‘treat us like prisoners’ as Iraqi forces close in

Reuters reports: As Iraqi forces close in on the western city of Ramadi, thousands of civilians are effectively being held hostage inside by Islamic State militants who want to use them as human shields.

Iraqi forces cut the hardline group’s last supply line into Ramadi in November, surrounding the city and making it almost impossible for the militants to send in reinforcements.

But for thousands of residents who remain trapped inside the mainly Sunni city, life has become even harder as the militants grow increasingly paranoid, residents said.

Reuters spoke to five residents inside the city and three who recently managed to get out. All said conditions inside had deteriorated to their worst since Islamic State overran it earlier this year.

“Daesh fighters are becoming more hostile and suspicious. They prevent us from leaving houses. Everyone who goes out against orders is caught and investigated,” said Abu Ahmed. “We feel we’re living inside a sealed casket.” [Continue reading…]

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The military reasons why Assad cannot beat ISIS

David Blair writes: The essential precondition for defeating Isil is to turn the Sunni population against them. The corollary is that only a largely Sunni force can achieve strategic victory against Isil.

The rank-and-file of the old Syrian army was mainly Sunni, reflecting the composition of the country’s population. But the old Syrian army has been put through the meat-grinder represented by over four years of civil war.

Before the insurrection against Assad began in 2011, the army had a paper strength of 220,000. Yet a huge proportion of that number – possibly the majority – defected to the rebels in the first 18 months of the uprising.

By the summer of 2012, Assad had placed the survival of his regime in the hands of only two units: the 4th Armoured Division and the Republican Guard. Both were recruited disproportionately from Assad’s own Alawite sect – and the 4th Armoured Division was commanded by his brother, Maher. The combined strength of both formations was never more than 30,000 men, or 14 per cent of the old army. Assad had effectively written off the other 86 per cent.

Since then, even these two units have been badly mauled. Today, the backbone of Assad’s forces is provided by Hizbollah, the radical Shia movement based in Lebanon, and the “National Defence Force”, a new Alawite-dominated militia, armed and trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

So Assad now commands a largely Shia and Alawite force, backed by Christian Russia and Shia Iran. He is a leader kept in power by foreign bayonets. His fighters also have a blood-curdling record of sectarian massacres of Sunnis. After more than four years of wanton slaughter, involving hideous barrel bombs and poison gas, Assad has been responsible for the deaths of more Sunnis than any man alive.

I put the conclusion delicately: it is not obvious that a force of this kind is best placed to drive a wedge between Isil and the Sunni population. If you really compelled the Sunnis of eastern Syria to choose between Isil and Assad – with his Shia and Alawite fighters steeped in Sunni blood – then they might make a very inconvenient decision. [Continue reading…]

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Obama no longer seems sure Assad must go

Josh Rogin writes: In his prime-time address Sunday night, President Barack Obama listed the diplomatic process on the Syria war, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, as one of the five most important things the administration is doing to fight the Islamic State. Yet behind the scenes, there is growing schism within the administration over whether ending that civil war requires eliminating its cause: the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

And there is increasing evidence that Obama is siding with those advisers who feel that demanding Assad’s ouster is holding back broader efforts to defeat the Islamic State. After years of insisting that Assad had to go, last month Obama spoke of a political process in which “we can start looking at Mr. Assad choosing not run.” From the Oval Office on Sunday, he made no mention of the dictator whatsoever.

“With American leadership, the international community has begun to establish a process — and timeline — to pursue cease-fires and a political resolution to the Syrian war,” said Obama. “Doing so will allow the Syrian people and every country, including our allies, but also countries like Russia, to focus on the common goal of destroying ISIL — a group that threatens us all.”

Everyone at the top level of the Obama administration agrees with the president that resolving the civil war in Syria is necessary to defeat the Islamic State. But when other officials talk about how to fight terrorism in the Middle East, they emphasize that ending Assad’s rule is a crucial and necessary part of that plan. [Continue reading…]

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Why ISIS isn’t going anywhere

Michael Weiss, in text prepared for his testimony in front of the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs on December 2, wrote: Policymakers here and abroad often speak as if ISIS only debuted as a significant insurgency and international terror threat in June 2014, when its soldiers stormed into Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul, almost uncontested. The president surely forgot himself when, in conversation with the New Yorker’s David Remnick, he referred to the group that had dispatched mentally disabled girls in Tal Afar as suicide bombers and blew up the Golden Mosque in Samarra as the “JV team.” But as you well know, this is a jihadist franchise, which with we have grown intimately acquainted for over a decade. It has long memory and is playing an even longer game.

Has it altered its strategy? No, not really, although it has placed greater tactical emphasis on its foreign operations since its capacity for receiving emigrating jihadists from New Jersey to Peshawar has shrunk, thanks to better policing and the relative closure of the Syrian-Turkish border.

Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, officially ISIS’s spokesman but in reality the man in charge of its dominion in Syria, defined the “state’s” foreign policy rather plainly in September: “If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State,” he said, “then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be.”

But Adnani was only reiterating what has always been ISIS’s global ambition—to export its holy war well beyond its immediate precincts or purview. The domestic pillar of ISIS’s project is what it calls “remaining and expanding”—the pushing of the borders of the caliphate in the Levant and Mesopotamia and the swelling of the ranks of its fighters and supporters there. We may pretend that ISIS is no state, but its ideologues and bureaucrats and petty officials behave as if they fully believe their own propaganda.

The foreign pillar is the opportunistic spreading of chaos, harm and wanton destruction in the West, relying upon agents who come from the West and who may or may not be returning veterans from a regional battlefield but rather everymen, Muslim or non-Muslim, who have been radicalized remotely. These jihadists are encouraged to strike at the kufar, the unbelievers, on the latter’s home turf or wherever they may be found, using methods both clever and crude: “an explosive device, a bullet, a knife, a car, a rock, or even a boot or a fist,” as al-Adnani elsewhere specified.

The two pillars have been in existence since the era of ISIS’s founder and godfather, the Jordanian jailbird Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Lest we forget, Zarqawi personally beheaded the American contractor Nicholas Berg in Iraq in 2004; two years before that, he had a direct hand in the assassination of 60 year-old American citizen and USAID worker Laurence Foley in Amman. [Continue reading…]

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The number of foreign fighters in Syria surged in 2015

The Soufan Group reports: In June 2014, The Soufan Group (TSG) released a report on Foreign Fighters in Syria. Now, 18 months later, despite sustained international effort to contain the so-called Islamic State and stem the flow of militants traveling to Syria, the number of foreign fighters has more than doubled. In an updated report released today, it becomes clear that neither the challenge of preventing people from traveling to Syria to join extremist groups nor the threat of unknown numbers returning to commit Paris-style attacks has been adequately countered or addressed.

The original report listed an estimated 12,000 people from 83 countries; today’s update estimates that between 27,000 and 31,000 people from at least 86 countries have traveled to Syria. Some of the increase likely stems from better disclosure and accounting by governments, but the increase is also testament to the enduring pull of the Islamic State’s narrative spread by social media across the globe. It also shows that as long as would-be foreign fighters have a physical destination to travel to, they will do so. As long as the group holds onto its self-proclaimed caliphate, people will try to join it.

The updated report also shows that while the phenomenon of Syrian-bound foreign fighters is indeed global, there are hotbeds of terror that send citizens to Raqqa and beyond in disproportionate numbers. Some are long-time generators of foreign fighters: Derna, Libya; Ben Gardane and Bizerte, Tunisia; and the Pankisi Gorge region of Georgia. Other places are more recent additions to the list of communities losing their youth to terror: the Molenbeek district of Brussels, Belgium; and the Lisleby district of Fredrikstad in Norway.

These hotbeds show the power of peer-to-peer recruitment. While the power of the Islamic State’s social media outreach is undeniable, it appears more often to prepare the ground for persuasion, rather than to force the decision. There are few places on earth in which the group’s message and imagery cannot be seen or heard, and its ubiquitous reach has led to the recruitment of individuals from Algeria to Uzbekistan. Yet, as hotbeds develop, recruitment through social media becomes less important than via direct human contact; clusters of friends and neighbors persuade each other to travel separately or together to join the Islamic State.

The report concludes that the issue of foreign fighters is both a near-term threat and a long-term challenge. The Syrian civil war will not end soon, and although the Islamic State is under more pressure than it was in June 2014 when TSG produced its original report, it is likely to survive in some form for a considerable time to come. It will attract more recruits from abroad, but they may differ from the earlier wave of hopefuls who were attracted by the prospect of a brand new state that would provide them what they could not find at home. As the Islamic State changes its focus from consolidating control of territory to attacking its foreign enemies in their homelands, or their interests elsewhere, the profile of its foreign recruits will also change. All the while, the group will continue to inspire attacks by those who do not wish to travel, but rather fight for the group in their country of residence.

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Muslims in U.S. report spike in discrimination, threats

CBS News reports: In the wake of the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Muslims around the U.S. say the rhetoric against them has becoming increasingly incendiary.

A few weeks ago, armed protesters picketed a mosque in Irving, Texas, some chanting “Every Muslim is a terrorist!”

In Virginia, tempers erupted at a meeting over building a mosque — one man yelled “every one of you are terrorists” at a Muslim man. Sunday night in Philadelphia, a severed pig’s head was found outside a mosque.

And voice messages saying “you’re not welcome here, I hope you get sprayed with pig’s blood,” among other things, was left on an answering machine of the Dallas chapter of CAIR, the Council of American Islamic Relations. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey sticks its neck out again, this time in Iraq

Metin Gurcan writes: In its second incredibly controversial move in as many weeks, Turkey drew Baghdad’s wrath over the weekend by dispatching uninvited reinforcement troops to Iraq. While Turkey said the move was merely routine, Baghdad called it a “violation of sovereignty” and told Ankara it had 48 hours to get those troops out.

Turkey has since said it will send no more troops but has not withdrawn any soldiers.

Ankara deployed the troops to the Bashiqa area of Iraq, just north of Mosul, the night of Dec. 4 — less than two weeks after Turkey downed a Russian warplane Nov. 24 near the Turkish-Syrian border. [Continue reading…]

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